1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to data transmission between computer systems where the systems are separated by a firewall, and more particularly to the use of hypertext transfer protocol and extensible markup language for the data transmission without a logon across the firewall.
2. Description of the Related Art
As known in the art, it is common for computer systems to install or erect firewall protection to control or restrict access to the system by users or computers that are not part of the system. However, there are circumstances where the system within the firewall (the protected system), needs to allow access by systems or computers that are on the opposite side of the firewall (the outside systems). One way to provide this access through the firewall is to require logon with various forms of authentication or credentials. Once an outside system has been properly authenticated, the outside system can gain access to the authorized data and/or files that are located on the protected system and that would not normally be available to the outside system. This form of logon and authentication does provide a measure of security to the protected system. However, it also requires a user account for the outside system, which may be undesirable for various reasons. For this reason, it is desirable to provide outside systems with access to some of the data on a protected system without providing system access.
As also known in the art, it is common for system administrators to provide regular tracking reports for distributed computer systems. These reports may include statistics on the numbers of users that have accessed a particular web page during a particular period. These types of reports are also generated at different levels of detail or fidelity to correspond to the different interest levels of management that want to review the data. System operators may be interested in much greater detail than senior administrators. However, the data the makes up these different individual reports typically comes from the same resources. Report generation tools exist, and they help with the collection and formatting of data for these types of reports. However, the tools are not particularly flexible in their design, and tend to require multiple resource queries to prepare reports of varying fidelity or detail. Additionally, the programming skills required to use these tools can be high. For this reason, it is desirable to provide tools that provide greater flexibility, while reducing the need to query a resource multiple times. It is also desirable that the tools be reusable, to reduce the need for expensive programming assets.
The preceding description is not to be construed as an admission that any of the description is prior art relative to the instant invention.